• U.S.

Milestones: May 21, 1984

3 minute read
TIME

BORN. To Adrienne Barbeau, 38, actress who was Maude’s tart-tongued daughter on TV for six years and is now a horror-movie queen (Creepshow), and John Carpenter, 36, fright-full film director (Christine) who has cast her in leading roles in his thriller-chillers The Fog and Escape from New York: their first child, a boy; in Los Angeles. Name: John Cody. Weight: 6 lbs. 4 oz.

RESIGNED. Anthony J. Alvarado, 41, innovative chancellor for a year of the New York City school system; four days before an administrative hearing into his fitness; in New York City. Alvarado was suspended in March after a preliminary report accused him of demonstrating “a disturbing disregard for many rules governing professional and personal conduct,” including accepting $63,000 in loans, many from subordinates who then earned large amounts of overtime pay. He still faces three criminal investigations into his tangled financial affairs.

DIED. William Egan, 69, Alaska’s first elected Governor and son of a gold miner, who led the drive to statehood for his vast, thinly populated territory; of cancer; in Anchorage. To push the cause, he organized and presided over a convention in 1955-56 to write a constitution and elect Senators and a Representative as if the territory were already a state; named a “Senator,” he went to Washington to lobby for the statehood bill that finally passed in June 1958. Elected to three gubernatorial terms (1958, 1962,1970), he dominated the state Democratic Party for more than 20 years.

DIED. Lila Acheson Wallace, 94, ebullient, strong-minded co-founder and -owner of Reader’s Digest, with her late husband DeWitt Wallace, and one of America’s greatest philanthropists; in Mount Kisco, N.Y. The couple met in 1920 when he was struggling to start his new venture, and she began married life stuffing solicitation envelopes in a Greenwich Village basement. As the Digest quickly prospered, she kept her editorial influence largely indirect. But it was she who took the lead in the childless Wallaces’ vast (more than $60 million over 30 years) charitable efforts. Personally overseeing many of the projects that she funded, Wallace had a special interest in gifts that continued her two passions: art and gardening. The millions she donated to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art created the newly expanded Egyptian galleries, which are named for her, and provided in perpetuity for fresh flowers in the Great Hall. She also contributed heavily to the restoration of Monet’s magnificent gardens at Giverny, to the renovation of Boscobel, an early 19th century Federal mansion not far from her home in suburban New York, and to the massive efforts to save the ancient Egyptian temples at Abu Simbel. Meticulously organized and attentive even to small details, she believed, “Beauty is medicine.”

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com